From: "Strong, Lee" <strongl at sddc.army.mil>
To: "'WSFA members'" <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Say What?
Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2004 13:20:19 -0500
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

        "A weapon of future-purification"?  I had the vague notion that
Campbell and Heinlein (among others) were trying to tell stories and
possibly earn a shekel or two from an appreciative audience.  What's this
"weapon of future-purification" stuff?

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Walsh [mailto:MJW at mail.press.jhu.edu]
Sent: Friday, January 02, 2004 1:05 PM
To: wsfalist at keithlynch.net
Subject: [WSFA] That "new" Heinlein novel . .

John Clute gives it a fairly positive review <http://www.scifi.com/sfw/curr=
ent/excess.html>.

"For us, though, in 2004, For Us, the Living, as far as its arguments go, =
is pure Heinlein; indeed, because almost every radical notion he ever =
generated appears here in utero, the book rewrites our sense of Heinlein's =
entire career; and because Heinlein's career, as we understood it, has =
always seemed expressive of the nature of American SF from 1939 to 1966, =
this small, slightly stumblebum first novel rewrites our understanding of =
those years, especially the early ones, when John W. Campbell Jr. was =
attempting to shape the nascent genre into a weapon of future-purification.=
"

mjw